Let's assume the Great Filter is in front of us. Perhaps biological life eventually creates machine life and then either withers away while machines take over,

Let's assume the Great Filter is in front of us. Perhaps biological life eventually creates machine life and then either withers away while machines take over, or fizzles out along the machines it made. Let's also assume that all these other lifeforms, like us, realize that the galaxy is full of livable worlds. There's no FTL, and nobody wants to take over a planet where life has a chance of making it past the filter. This would mean that the only contact would be machine probes who left their civilizations tens of thousands of years into the past. Such probes would be programmed not to initiate contact with worlds with life on them. Instead, collect some data and leave, moving on to other planets and systems. If this is the case, heck, we might have been visited by millions of other intelligent civilizations. The only thing we'd have to show for it would be perhaps the appearance of truly mysterious lights in the sky every decade or so. If you want to stretch your imagination a bit, perhaps a Rendlesham Forest-type incident. I seriously doubt biological life is very interesting to any other civilizations. I doubt they communicate in any way similar to the ways we communicate, and I feel that any direct contact would be so removed and non-reproducible to be useless. There are a lot of hidden assumptions you have to make for Fermi's Paradox to truly be a paradox. (Same goes for my argument, of course.)